Posts by JimC 1944 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
If global warming is occuring sufficiently to be dmaging that it doesn't matter a damn whether its man made or not, and the most economical engineering solution should be sought. The doctrinaire stuff about manmade this and trying to reverse CO2 ommissions needs to be junked in favour of the most effective engineering solution...
One possibility is that the application has some proprietary features and won't run properly with any other terminal emulator. I'm sure there will be plenty of people here who'll suggest that the application should have been bought if it wasn't fully standards compliant, but if its the one that best supports the customers needs you'll find that will have throughly trumped standards compliance in the shopping process. Unfortunately in the real world things are a lot more complicated than the more doctrinaire will believe, be they the "only use open source" zealots or the "only buy microsoft" zealots... In practical terms I reckon both are equally divorced from reality!
of the damn SORN thing anyway? It seems like just a stealth tax. If its on the road and not taxed then that's all the cops need to fine the owner: the SORN is irrelevant. All I know is that its a frigging nuisance if your vehicle isn't a runner at tax renewal time: if its not running you can't MOT it, then you can't tax it, then you have to fill in the frigging sorn, then you have to un sorn it to tax it... It used to be a damn sight easier when you could just send the form off a few weeks later when you got the MOT...
You know, I think this is just "the big lie". If you look at the Sunday Times rich list there are a lot more artists than record company executives on it... Sure every artist things the company takes too big a slice, and maybe they are right, but then I think the taxman takes too big a slice out of my income.
I should have made a note of it, but I saw a piece on the BBC web site about the psychological tricks used by people who brake the law to justify it to themslves, and the freetards hit every one that interview is full of that kind of self justifying deception... Me, I'm with the Sony guy, but then there was a time when some of my income came out of music...
Yes, Connor, Virgin's predecessors did manage it, but they all went bust doing it. AIUI Virgin or whatever got the infrastructure for 5 pounds and a mars bar rom the receivers, which is a very good business model if you can find a fool (or a Government) to lose the money in the first place. If on the other you you don't want to follow the well trodden path into bankruptcy you are very careful indeed...
Good idea: if all the bandwidth hoggers got off my ISP the performance would go way up...
Obviously blocking traffic and NOT telling your customers is poor, bordering on criminal behaviour, but ISPS should be able to compete on which services they offer, and no peer to peer etc so the links and contention ratios are superior and so I'm not subsidising the pirates would be a selling point to me.
> Last week, it was the turn of French organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF) to put
> the boot in, as it listed Australia, along with South Korea, Turkey and Russia, as
> countries "under surveillance" in its "Internet Enemies" report.
Aw no really, well dammit, that's got the old roos quaking in their boots...
No worries, say the Aussies, we'll change our government policy on the say so of a few self-appointed frogs we've never heard of...
French organisation reporters without borders... anyone spot the irony? But honestly, who's going to give a stuff what *they* say?
> How could they sell that which is already distributed freely
Sigh. Read up on GPL3 and why Stallman et al felt it was necessary. They don't sell an identical shrink wrap, they sell something that contains large chunks of the code, thus saving yourself shed loads of development time.
> All the fuss about this vulnerability airs one of the industry's sadder facts:
> Much of it remains unwilling or unable to upgrade to the latest version of IE.
Isn't the really sad fact that this constant upgrade schedule is necessary at all. Most of the 6,000 odd users I support couldn't give a flying **** what operating system or browser or anything else they run. They just want the b*****y computer to work reliably and quickly and do the same thing tomorrow that it did yesterday so they can get on with the job... Constant patches and changes from IT are at best just a troublesome annoyance.
Between all Microsoft AND all the companies who produced horrendous html, usually in a desire to make their sites look a little more whizzy than the next one. Depressingly often it was the web developers wanting to show off with flash bits just as often as it was managers requesting them. And don't get me started on graphical designers.... Basic html always has worked...
I don't want software with DRM so I won't buy it is perfectly fair and reasonable, and doubtless the market will demonstrate whether its better business to have x% paying of a presumably larger number of users rather than 100% of a lower number of users and copy protection of some kind.
But can anyone make a morally acceptable case for DDOS, hacking or whatever? Surely all its doing is attempting to remove other folks freedom to decide for themselves whether the downsides of copy protexcted software exceed the upsides? As such its just a variation on the terrorrism theme isn't it? And also, of course, liable to bring down legislation. I wonder how long net anonymity will last with so much of this sort of thing going on...
To be fair to the guy the highest quality most rabid flames seem to come from those who have little to do but sit behind a keyboard all day. Whilst we might doubt the effectiveness and practicality of what our here is doing, its clear that it takes up more of his time than internet flaming does.
I used to think that search engines would be the death of the essentially parasitic advertising industry, because it would mean there would be a direct link between creators - whether of physical or intellectual - goods and the purchasers. Thus the customer would pay less and the creator would get paid more without the parasitic middleman.
But look what's happened: the damn advertisers are getting more money than ever and the creators even less. And in the case of "Intellectual" goods the advertisers grab all the money through link farms of mp3s or whatever and the creator gets absolutely damn all.
"May you rot... in your grave new world"
What makes the system so dubious is not the source of the funding, but the impact of the results... Governments/semi autonomous bodies like universities are probably the only way pure science can be funded. But as soon as your academic tenure, thus your job depends on getting the right sort of results to demonstrate that funding should be continued then there is quite unbelieveable pressure to get the "right" results, because if you get the wrong results you get to pick up your coat and leave...
Call me a cynic, but I interpret that as "we couldn't figure out how the hell to do the security/privacy bit so we went ahead hoping people wouldn't care". As anyone who's worked in user secuity support will tell you that was a fairly safe bet...
It matters not one jot whether any climate change is "natural" or "anthropogenic": the results are exactly the same and the human problem is the same. If all of South East England disappears beneath the waves then it will scarcely be a comfort to say, "Oh its all right, its a perfectly natural phenomenum"... Its probably also true that no matter whether warming (or cooling) its natural or artificial the best solution is probably the same.
The relevance of the anthropogenic stuff seems to be mainly about scare stories and ways of making predictions, and the predictions especially seem to me to be by far the rockiest part of the science. Also of course the rather infantile assumption that if the cause of the warming affect is A then the best solution is to reverse A. Even some fairly low quality thinking ought to suggest that this is not necessarilly the case!
A is easy: The climate is changing. Always has been changing, always will.
B is a bit more tricky because the measures used for estimating historical changes are a tad shaky, especially for measuring short term changes. One of the most controversial things about the old hockey stick is that different means are used for deriving the values of different parts of the curve...
C seems to be, to say the least, on the borders of what the science can reliably offer at the moment
D well who knows...
Mind you that's not an exuse to do nothing: there are a lot of things that are sensible to do no matter in what direction and why the climate is changing.
Burning fossil fuels is a pretty damn silly idea, so the less the better. There are better things to do with the oil. Mind you all of history tells us that wind power has always been a last resort when nothing better is available... If water power can't scale without major ecological catastrophe (like a Severn barrage) then build nukes... Cut down on excess travel too..
Filling the atmosphere with soot/chemicals/other dross is a pretty silly idea too, so lets do as much as possible to stop that.
Breeding another billion people every decade or whatever is pretty damn silly too, but I don't see too much empahsis on that one...
Well, by the sound of things its not six stars all in a bunch. You've got three pairs of stars, each revolving round a common centre of gravity. Then two of the pairs are revolving round a common centre of gravity, and that cog is revolving round a common cog with the other pair. How stable it is will depend on how far apart each individual pair is... Presumably they are all pretty well spaced...
A couple of times in the last couple of weeks I've ben trying to research some woodworking kit, and found it just about impossible to find the manufacturers' web site with real information. Google ws just been throwing up paid links, 99 dozen resellers with no information at all and link farms. It was a real struggle trying to get the real info. In one case I was stuck with guessing likely domain names rather than use search... And yes, I clicked on umpteen of those useless links in order to see if anyone was referencing the manufacturers web page, so google were mounting up the old clickthroughs...
> I am sure that 99.99% of the country would kill to be on a trial
I rather suspect that a majority of the actual population of the country doesn't give a damn about faster broadband. Latest stat I can immediately spot suggests that only about 65% of the country has broadband at all, so all the occupants of the remaining 35% of households obviously won't care. Then what percentage of the remaining really want faster broadband? All those under 5 won't care, all those who just use the net for email and some web browsing probably don't care - I certainly don't... I reckon that's going to be easily half the population of the remaining households...
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